# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S281
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Rhenish Palatinate Church Struggle. 281

...human right is guaranteed by the Peace of Religion, the commemorative celebration of which was solemnly observed also in the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate.

If this is so, and if the separation from the confessionless union is, as is plain to see, a moral necessity for Lutheran consciences, then it cannot, whether among the clergy or among the members of congregations, be a contrived affair; those there of Lutheran mind, at least, did not make it, but rather those who made the union and the present church government have called it forth and made it. Now if the pastors withdraw from the alien united Church, then at once, or later, the individual congregations devoted to the Lutheran confession gather around them. The existence of such congregations can surely be nothing wrongful, and likewise nothing contrived, since the Lutheran Church itself is no wrong, but rather is most fully warranted precisely on Bavarian soil. — Temptations and snares are indeed present in abundance in the state of separation, nor is suffering lacking either; but just as the latter is borne joyfully for conscience's sake, so the former are overcome through the grace of God, who Himself has taught us to pray: "And though we be assailed thereby, that we may yet at last prevail and keep the victory." The former standing of the dear brothers was, in any case, more full of temptation, and on this side of the Rhine too they will not remain preserved from temptations and snares.

The Lutheran-minded pastors of the Rhenish Palatinate have now indeed withdrawn from the union *), but they have at once left the country, and that is precisely what makes us uneasy. The Lutheran-minded members of the congregations are now left utterly abandoned; the Lutheran confession and the dear Church appear proscribed and banished, not only on the ground of the union, but on the whole soil of the Palatinate, and the union hostile to the confession appears as the sole rightful one, as far as the Palatine border extends. We have only briefly and gently hinted at these misgivings, since we did not wish to raise any hurtful reproach against the esteemed brothers in the faith, nor to subject their course of action to a subsequent criticism. But all the more would we urge the dear brothers, and ask them in heartfelt love, to express themselves more fully on this matter and kindly to instruct us, should we have erred in our intimations.

To what precedes I cannot forbear to append a few questions:

1. Might it not, after all, in the end be the case that the Palatine congregations, as a consequence of the rationalism and unionism that has long prevailed there, have become wholly devoid of any understanding or feeling for a Lutheran-churchly character?

2. Might not the "Lutheran-minded" pastors among them themselves also

*) All of them? For the present I know of only one. — Freim.